Woman in White (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Wilkie Collins

  All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to force themselves to the surface in those words; all his heart was poured out to me, for the first time in our lives—but still, his voice never rose; still his dread of the terrible revelation he was making to me, never left him.

  ‘So far,’ he resumed, ‘you think the Society like other Societies. Its object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution. It takes the life of a bad King or a bad Minister, as if the one and the other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first opportunity. I grant you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other political society on the face of the earth. The members are not known to one another. There is a President in Italy; there are Presidents abroad. Each of these has his Secretary. The Presidents and the Secretaries know the members; but the members, among themselves, are all strangers, until their Chiefs see fit, in the political necessity of the time, or in the private necessity of the society, to make them known to each other. With such a safeguard as this, there is no oath among us on admittance. We are identified with the Brotherhood by a secret mark, which we all bear, which lasts while our lives last. We are told to go about our ordinary business, and to report ourselves to the President, or the Secretary, four times a year, in the event of our services being required. We are warned, if we betray the Brotherhood, or if we injure it by serving other interests, that we die by the principles of the Brotherhood—die by the hand of a stranger who may be sent from the other end of the world to strike the blow—or by the hand of our own bosom-friend, who may have been a member unknown to us through all the years of our intimacy. Sometimes, the death is delayed; sometimes, it follows close on the treachery. It is our first business to know how to wait—our second business to know how to obey when the word is spoken. Some of us may wait our lives through, and may not be wanted. Some of us may be called to the work, or to the preparation for the work, the very day of our admission. I myself—the little, easy, cheerful man you know, who, of his own accord, would hardly lift up his handkerchief to strike down the fly that buzzes about his face—I, in my younger time, under provocation so dreadful that I will not tell you of it, entered the Brotherhood by an impulse, as I might have killed myself by an impulse. I must remain in it, now—it has got me, whatever I may think of it in my better circumstances and my cooler manhood, to my dying day. While I was still in Italy, I was chosen Secretary; and all the members of that time, who were brought face to face with my President, were brought face to face also with me.’

  I began to understand him; I saw the end towards which his extraordinary disclosure was now tending. He waited a moment, watching me earnestly—watching, till he had evidently guessed what was passing in my mind, before he resumed.

  ‘You have drawn your own conclusion already,’ he said. ‘I see it in your face. Tell me nothing; keep me out of the secret of your thoughts. Let me make my one last sacrifice of myself, for your sake—and then have done with this subject, never to return to it again.’

  He signed to me not to answer him—rose—removed his coat—and rolled up the shirt-sleeve on his left arm.

  ‘I promised you that this confidence should be complete,’ he whispered, speaking close at my ear, with his eyes looking watchfully at the door. ‘Whatever comes of it, you shall not reproach me with having hidden anything from you which it was necessary to your interests to know. I have said that the Brotherhood identifies its members by a mark that lasts for life. See the place, and the mark on it for yourself.’

  He raised his bare arm, and showed me, high on the upper part of it and on the inner side, a brand deeply burnt in the flesh and stained of a bright blood-red colour. I abstain from describing the device which the brand represented. It will be sufficient to say that it was circular in form, and so small that it would have been completely covered by a shilling coin.

  ‘A man who has this mark, branded in this place,’ he said, covering his arm again, ‘is a member of the Brotherhood. A man who has been false to the Brotherhood is discovered sooner or later, by the Chiefs who know him—Presidents or Secretaries, as the case may be. And a man discovered by the Chiefs is dead. No human laws can protect him. Remember what you have seen and heard; draw what conclusions you like; act as you please. But, in the name of God, whatever you discover, whatever you do, tell me nothing! Let me remain free from a responsibility which it horrifies me to think of—which I know, in my conscience, is not my responsibility, now. For the last time, I say it—on my honour as a gentleman, on my oath as a Christian, if the man you pointed out at the Opera knows me, he is so altered, or so disguised, that I do not know him. I am ignorant of his proceedings or his purposes in England—I never saw him, I never heard the name he goes by, to my knowledge, before to-night. I say no more. Leave me a little, Walter: I am overpowered by what has happened; I am shaken by what I have said. Let me try to be like myself again, when we meet next.’

  He dropped into a chair; and, turning away from me, hid his face in his hands. I gently opened the door, so as not to disturb him—and spoke my few parting words in low tones, which he might hear or not, as he pleased.

  ‘I will keep the memory of to-night in my heart of hearts,’ I said. ‘You shall never repent the trust you have reposed in me. May I come to you to-morrow? May I come as early as nine o’clock?’

  ‘Yes, Walter,’ he replied, looking up at me kindly, and speaking in English once more, as if his one anxiety, now, was to get back to our former relations towards each other. ‘Come to my little bit of breakfast, before I go my ways among the pupils that I teach.’

  ‘Good night, Pesca.’

  ‘Good night, my friend.’

  VI

  MY FIRST CONVICTION, AS soon as I found myself outside the house, was that no alternative was left me but to act at once on the information I had received—to make sure of the Count, that night, or to risk the loss, if I only delayed till the morning, of Laura’s last chance. I looked at my watch: it was ten o’clock.

  Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question, the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm—I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand—and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience—I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca.

  It was easy to understand why that recognition had not been mutual. A man of the Count’s character would never risk the terrible consequences of turning spy without looking to his personal security quite as carefully as he looked to his golden reward. The shaven face, which I had pointed out at the Opera might have been covered by a beard in Pesca’s time; his dark brown hair might be a wig; his name was evidently a false one. The accident of time might have helped him as well—his immense corpulence might have come with his later years. There was every reason why Pesca should not have known him again—every reason, also, why he should have known Pesca, whose singular personal appearance made a marked man of him, go where he might.

  I have said that I felt certain of the purpose in the Count’s mind when he escaped us at the theatre. How could I doubt it, when I saw, with my own eyes, that he believed himself, in spite of the change in his appearance, to have been recognised by Pesca, and to be therefore in danger of his life? If I could get speech of him that night, if I could show him that I, too, knew of the mortal peril in which he stood, what result would follow? Plainly this. One of us must be master of the situation—one of us must inevitably be at the mercy of the other.

  I owed it to myself to consider the chances against me, before I confronted them. I owed it to my wife to do all that lay in my power to lessen the risk.

  The chances against me wanted no reckoning up: they were all merged in one. If the Count discovered, by my own avowal, that the direct way to his safety lay through my life, he was probably the last man in existence who would shrink from throwing me off my guard and taking that way, when he had
me alone within his reach. The only means of defence against him on which I could at all rely to lessen the risk, presented themselves, after a little careful thinking, clearly enough. Before I made any personal acknowledgment of my discovery in his presence, I must place the discovery itself where it would be ready for instant use against him, and safe from any attempt at suppression on his part. If I laid the mine under his feet before I approached him, and if I left instructions with a third person to fire it, on the expiration of a certain time, unless directions to the contrary were previously received under my own hand, or from my own lips—in that event, the Count’s security was absolutely dependent upon mine, and I might hold the vantage ground over him securely, even in his own house.

  This idea occurred to me when I was close to the new lodgings which we had taken on returning from the sea-side. I went in, without disturbing any one, by the help of my key. A light was in the hall; and I stole up with it to my work-room, to make my preparations, and absolutely to commit myself to an interview with the Count, before either Laura or Marian could have the slightest suspicion of what I intended to do.

  A letter addressed to Pesca represented the surest measure of precaution which it was now possible for me to take. I wrote as follows:

  ‘The man whom I pointed out to you at the Opera, is a member of the Botherhood, and has been false to his trust. Put both these assertions to the test, instantly. You know the name he goes by in England. His address is No. 5, Forest-road, St. John’s Wood. On the love you once bore me, use the power entrusted to you, without mercy and without delay, against that man. I have risked all and lost all—and the forfeit of my failure has been paid with my life.’

  I signed and dated these lines, enclosed them in an envelope, and sealed it up. On the outside, I wrote this direction: ‘Keep the enclosure unopened, until nine o’clock to-morrow morning. If you do not hear from me, or see me, before that time, break the seal when the clock strikes, and read the contents.’ I added my initials; and protected the whole by enclosing it in a second sealed envelope, addressed to Pesca at his lodgings.

  Nothing remained to be done after this but to find the means of sending my letter to its destination immediately. I should then have accomplished all that lay in my power. If anything happened to me in the Count’s house, I had now provided for his answering it with his life.

  That the means of preventing his escape under any circumstances whatever, were at Pesca’s disposal, if he chose to exert them, I did not for an instant doubt. The extraordinary anxiety which he had expressed to remain unenlightened as to the Count’s identity—or, in other words, to be left uncertain enough about facts to justify him to his own conscience in remaining passive—betrayed plainly that the means of exercising the terrible justice of the Brotherhood were ready to his hand, although, as a naturally humane man, he had shrunk from plainly saying as much in my presence. The deadly certainty with which the vengeance of foreign political societies can hunt down a traitor to the cause, hide himself where he may, had been too often exemplified, even in my superficial experience, to allow of any doubt. Considering the subject only as a reader of newspapers, cases recurred to my memory, both in London and in Paris, of foreigners found stabbed in the streets, whose assassins could never be traced—of bodies and parts of bodies, thrown into the Thames and the Seine, by hands that could never be discovered—of deaths by secret violence which could only be accounted for in one way. I have disguised nothing relating to myself in these pages—and I do not disguise here, that I believed I had written Count Fosco’s death-warrant, if the fatal emergency happened which authorised Pesca to open my enclosure.

  I left my room to go down to the ground-floor of the house, and speak to the landlord about finding me a messenger. He happened to be ascending the stairs at the time, and we met on the landing. His son, a quick lad, was the messenger he proposed to me, on hearing what I wanted. We had the boy up-stairs; and I gave him his directions. He was to take the letter in a cab, to put it into Professor Pesca’s own hands, and to bring me back a line of acknowledgment from that gentleman; returning in the cab, and keeping it at the door for my use. It was then nearly half-past ten. I calculated that the boy might be back in twenty minutes; and that I might drive to St. John’s Wood, on his return, in twenty minutes more.

  When the lad had departed on his errand, I returned to my own room for a little while, to put certain papers in order, so that they might be easily found, in case of the worst. The key of the old-fashioned bureau in which the papers were kept, I sealed up, and left it on my table, with Marian’s name written on the outside of the little packet. This done, I went down stairs to the sitting-room, in which I expected to find Laura and Marian awaiting my return from the Opera. I felt my hand trembling for the first time, when I laid it on the lock of the door.

  No one was in the room but Marian. She was reading; and she looked at her watch, in surprise, when I came in.

  ‘How early you are back!’ she said. ‘You must have come away before the opera was over.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied; ‘neither Pesca nor I waited for the end. Where is Laura?’

  ‘She had one of her bad headaches this evening; and I advised her to go to bed, when we had done tea.’

  I left the room again, on the pretext of wishing to see whether Laura was asleep. Marian’s quick eyes were beginning to look inquiringly at my face; Marian’s quick instinct was beginning to discover that I had something weighing on my mind.

  When I entered the bed-chamber, and softly approached the bedside by the dim flicker of the night-lamp, my wife was asleep.

  We had not been married quite a month yet. If my heart was heavy, if my resolution for a moment faltered again, when I looked at her face turned faithfully to my pillow in her sleep—when I saw her hand resting open on the coverlid, as if it was waiting unconsciously for mine—surely there was some excuse for me? I only allowed myself a few minutes to kneel down at the bedside, and to look close at her—so close that her breath, as it came and went, fluttered on my face. I only touched her hand and her cheek with my lips, at parting. She stirred in her sleep, and murmured my name—but without waking. I lingered for an instant at the door to look at her again. ‘God bless and keep you, my darling!’ I whispered—and left her.

  Marian was at the stair-head waiting for me. She had a folded slip of paper in her hand.

  ‘The landlord’s son has brought this for you,’ she said. ‘He has got a cab at the door—he says you ordered him to keep it at your disposal.’

  ‘Quite right, Marian. I want the cab; I am going out again.’

  I descended the stairs as I spoke, and looked into the sitting-room to read the slip of paper by the light on the table. It contained these two sentences, in Pesca’s handwriting:—

  ‘Your letter is received. If I don’t see you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock strikes.’

  I placed the paper in my pocket-book, and made for the door. Marian met me on the threshold, and pushed me back into the room where the candlelight fell full on my face. She held me by both hands, and her eyes fastened searchingly on mine.

  ‘I see!’ she said, in a low eager whisper. ‘You are trying the last chance to-night.’

  ‘Yes—the last chance and the best,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Not alone! Oh, Walter, for God’s sake not alone! Let me go with you. Don’t refuse me because I’m only a woman. I must go! I will go! I’ll wait outside in the cab!’

  It was my turn now to hold her. She tried to break away from me, and get down first to the door.

  ‘If you want to help me,’ I said, ‘stop here, and sleep in my wife’s room to-night. Only let me go away, with my mind easy about Laura, and I answer for everything else. Come, Marian, give me a kiss, and show that you have the courage to wait till I come back.’

  I dared not allow her time to say a word more. She tried to hold me again. I unclasped her hands—and was out of the room in a moment. The boy below h
eard me on the stairs, and opened the hall-door. I jumped into the cab, before the driver could get off the box. ‘Forest-road, St. John’s Wood,’ I called to him through the front window. ‘Double fare, if you get there in a quarter of an hour.’ ‘I’ll do it, sir.’ I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock—not a minute to lose.

  The rapid motion of the cab, the sense that every instant now was bringing me nearer to the Count, the conviction that I was embarked at last, without let or hindrance, on my hazardous enterprise, heated me into such a fever of excitement that I shouted to the man to go faster and faster. As we left the streets, and crossed St. John’s Wood-road, my impatience so completely overpowered me that I stood up in the cab and stretched my head out of the window, to see the end of the journey before we reached it. Just as a church clock in the distance struck the quarter past, we turned into the Forest-road. I stopped the driver a little away from the Count’s house—paid and dismissed him—and walked on to the door.